Carriers: Someone early in the thread speculated that it would be great if Apple released a pair of unlocked phones that would work on the wireless carrier of your choice. While I agree that this would be great, it will not happen. Wireless carries are extremely conservative about what phones they will allow on their networks. For example, Verizon (the largest US carrier) puts all of its phones through a rigorous certification process before it releases them, as well as loading them with custom Verizon firmware. They do not allow non certified phones to be activated on their network. So, if they ever did release the iPhone, it would be a Verizon version purchased from Verizon, probably with a featureset limited by Verizon.
WiMax. Someone said they wanted a WiMax enabled phone, which I agree would be sweet, but it's also not going to happen yet. There is no mobile WiMax chipset yet. Yes, there are a couple cities that have WiMax deployed, but you need an external receiver box and antenna to use it - it's to mount on the outside of you house, no so conducive to laptops (or phones).
Videoconferencing. This could be the killer app if they do it right. Someone mentioned the asymetric bandwidth issue, with which I totally agree - phone companies aren't interested in giving you much upload bandwidth. However, someone else speculated that video could be an option that's only enabled when you're connected to WiFi - this seems the most likely implementation to me. While I'm sure with a dedicated chip they could pull off compression decent enough to send video over a cellular link, the other problem that they'd run into is latency, and I don't know how they would solve that on the cellular link. Then again, they're smarter than me, so maybe they'll figure it out.
Random comments. Battery life - sure, 200 hours of standby time is nice, but really, is it so much to ask to charge your phone every night? It's a rare night that I sleep away from a power outlet. And if I'm camping, I'm not taking my precious iPhone along. Skype - iChat has built in voice functionality and Skype is a competitor in that space. Of course what we're looking for is a VoIP client that can call regular phones so we can avoid fees, but the wireless carriers will sure push back hard on that one - once you no longer need their network, you no longer need them. I'm sure Apple could set up VoIP -> POTS calling in iChat AV, but I don't think they're interesting in getting into that space. I agree it would be sweet though. Presence - this will be important. Being able to set your "available/away" status, or even better, available for "text/voice/video" escalating presence. iChat AV already has this, so I would be surprised if they didn't carry this over. One idea that I thought would be neat would be to set your presence automatically using your iCal calendar. ie, if I have a meeting from 1pm-2pm, the phone automatically sets my presence to "Available - Text" for that period, and back to "Available - Video" when I'm done.
Oh, and the Slingbox style streaming form iTV is a great idea too.
